DreamsI've been keeping a dream journal on a special Twitter account since I was 23 years old. You can read these raw forms, if you'd like: @IHadaDreamWhere. I'm going to be adapting 99 of them as microstories.

Saturdays (mezzofiction)

Missy’s MissionWith the help of a friend, a young woman searches a rogue planet for the rumored means of getting rid of her special time powers, since having them puts her in the crosshairs of a psychotic time traveling killer.

My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Leona Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Leona, and add to the larger mythology.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Microstory 844: Remake a Killing

In the old days, there were virtually no rules when it came to what you were allowed to do when it came to art, and what you couldn’t. Basically, the only things prohibited were things that were illegal anyway. One guy tried to film a dog literally starving to death once, but his local law enforcement put a quick end to that experiment. In the film industry’s heyday, there was almost no originality. Nearly everything released was a remake, reboot, sequel, or adaptation. When you thought you were watching something you hadn’t seen before, there was often a small article that proved it was actually ultimately based on something prior. When the New Rule came to power, they made a lot of decisions that harmed people’s ways of life. They created inequality, and made it harder for some to find steady work. While rebels were fighting against these atrocious conditions, they largely ignored the smaller changes the New Rule made, because they didn’t threaten anybody’s life, or livelihood. Though one could argue that hindering what type of art an artist is allowed to make does indeed damage our freedoms, their reasoning was not completely absurd. There is something to be said for requiring every new entry in the pantheon of films to be fresh and new. Once the rebellion successfully put an end to the New Rule administration, the Originality Clause was left in the revised Constitution, because there wasn’t enough outcry against it, and we were already changing too much of the document, which has been through oh so many iterations throughout our entire history. So now we live in a world without remakes, except for one...well, seven.

A Killer Remade was the last remake to be released before the New Rule instituted their laws, its fitting title a mere coincidence. Its predecessor was created only one year prior, but audiences and critics were disappointed in it, so the filmmakers hastily shot a new version that was even worse than the last. It involved an all new cast, save for the actor who played The Rainbleeder; a chiefly ad-libbed script, built from what the new actors simply recalled by having seen the original a few times; and a wildly different ending. At the time, this debacle was ignored by most the majority of moviegoers, because they were too busy being oppressed to worry about it. Shortly after the government stabilized, though, a particular fan decided to remake it for a second time, even though this was still against the law. In a surprising turn of events, our interim leaders decided to not prosecute the filmmaker, but instead declared that this would be the only legal remake in existence, and that it would continue to be remade year after year, until there was no longer anyone interested in being part of it. The same actor still plays The Rainbleeder, but that’s not part of the agreement; it’s just an interesting bit of trivia. And so this is how it started, the Curse of A Killer Remade. A new version is made every single year, and every single year, at least three people are killed in parts surrounding the annual festival where the film is screened. No matter how much security, or how many cops, are placed at the scene, a serial killer will always find his targets, and never be caught. Some call him a maniac, others a genius...but we just call ourselves The Council of Killers. We’re not sure why no one has figured out that there’s a whole group of us yet, since that was the twist ending from the second version, but we’ll keep doing this until someone stops us.